Lost Records,
Saved Stories

The life of each person is reflected in many different documents, a small part of which ends up in archives. But even documents that are lucky enough to be in the archive are not protected from disappearing - they burn in fires, get soaked in water, they are destroyed by mold, destroyed by wars and political conditions, documents are destroyed by frequent use and inept restoration. More than half of the documents are disposed from archives “after their storage period has expired” and as “having no historical value.” In this case, unique information and evidence are irretrievably lost. And yet, despite the irreparable losses, one or another document remains in the archives about literally every person who lived in the last few centuries. It is not necessary that these are metric books and population censuses. The archives contain unusual and unexpected evidence containing stunning information.

 

It is very important to know the names of ancestors and remember the dates of their lives. But this, of course, is not enough. Knowing only names and dates, it is impossible to reconstruct biographies even in general terms. To do this, it is very important to find documents about work, about rewards and punishments, about property, about migrations and other biographical events and milestones. Even more important and interesting are the finds of purely personal and creative documents and evidence: letters, diaries and memoirs, photographs and drawings, informal testimonies of other people about the wanted persons. Each such discovery is a great success; it preserves not the external circumstances of life, but the course of thought and the state of a person’s soul. In the course of my work, I found amazing evidence, the existence of which was impossible to imagine.

 

In recent years, archives have been undergoing the process of scanning and indexing documents, which opens up the possibility of searching for information in huge amounts of data. Over the past twenty years, less than 1% of archival documents have been scanned. And the speed of scanning lags behind the rate of loss of priceless archival treasures.

 

Searching for information and documents in archives is the main direction of my work. I undertake the most complex research in state, departmental and special archives of many countries in Europe and Asia (over 35 years of work, I have successfully completed more than 200 studies in 127 archives in ten countries around the world). In many cases, I can offer an archival search with a guarantee of a positive result.